Information for Victims in Large Cases

The indictment charges Mario Castro, 51, Jose Salud Castro, 70, Salvador Castro, 53, Miguel Castro, 55, Jose Luis Mendez, 45, and Andrea Burrow, 49, with mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud.  According to the indictment, the defendants ran a fraudulent prize-notification scheme that tricked hundreds of thousands of consumers, many of whom were elderly and vulnerable, into paying a $20 or $30 fee to claim a large cash prize.  None of the victims who submitted fees ever received a large cash prize, the indictment alleges.

The three-count superseding indictment charges 10 executives and employees at major broiler chicken producers for their participation in a conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chicken products from at least 2012 until at least early 2019.

Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute, LLC was charged with participating in a conspiracy to suppress and eliminate competition by agreeing to allocate the provision of medical and radiation oncology services. Specifically, FCS and its co-conspirators agreed not to compete to provide chemotherapy and radiation treatments to cancer patients in Southwest Florida.  Beginning as early as 1999 and continuing until at least 2016, FCS entered into an illegal agreement that allocated chemotherapy treatments to FCS and radiation treatments to a competing oncology group.

The defendants operated a bogus computer technical support company.  Victims would obtain the toll-free number for the phony service through either (1) a pop-up advertisement that would appear on the victim’s computer, or (2) through an Internet search for technical support services.  Victims’ calls would be routed to a call center in India, where an individual posing as a technical support technician would obtain remote access to their computers and falsely inform the victims that their computers had been targeted by hackers and/or had been infected with malware.  The phony technician would then pretend to perform repairs and/or install unneeded computer programs.  The victim would be billed between $300 and $1,500 for the bogus work performed, and would be instructed to send payment, either by U.S. Postal Service or FedEx, to an address inside the United States.  Upon receipt of the payments, defendants inside the United States would send the money to defendants in India.

Lance Mann has been charged with identity theft for his role in unlawfully obtaining victims’ confidential financial and personal information, including drivers licenses, Social Security cards, and credit card information. Included in the unlawfully obtained information was a list of names, home addresses, and credit card numbers belonging to victims who purchased tickets for tour buses visiting the Grand Canyon. Investigators believe that many of those transactions occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sandoz Inc. was charged with participating in four conspiracies to suppress and eliminate competition by agreeing to allocate customers, rig bids, and fix prices for generic drugs.  The charged conspiracies took place between 2013 and 2015.

Hector Armando Kellum was charged with participating in a conspiracy to suppress and eliminate competition by agreeing to allocate customers and rig bids for, and stabilize, maintain, and fix prices of, generic drugs sold in the United States from at least as early as March 2013 until at least June 2015.

Ara Aprahamian was charged with engaging in two conspiracies to suppress and eliminate competition by agreeing to allocate customers and rig bids for, and stabilize, maintain, and fix prices of, generic drugs sold in the United States from at least as early as Spring 2013 and continuing until at least 2015.

 As alleged in the indictment and court documents, from at least January 2010 until November 8, 2019, Perwaiz was a licensed physician, board certified to practice obstetrics and gynecology.  He was a solo practitioner and operated two different offices in Chesapeake, Virginia.  At the time of his arrest, it is estimated he had well over 1,000 active patients. Throughout this time period, Perwaiz submitted tens of thousands of fraudulent claims to various health care benefit programs for unnecessary, uninformed, and/or fraudulent gynecological procedures.  As part of his scheme and to justify his bills, Perwaiz would falsely claim that patients asked for the billed procedures/surgeries, falsify symptoms and complaints supposedly made by the patients, and falsely claim to perform diagnostic procedures, among other conduct.

The public is reminded that a criminal indictment contains only charges and is not evidence of guilt. The defendant is presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair trial at which the government has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

From approximately 2011-2013, Burkov, a national and resident of Russia, ran a website called Card Planet that sold stolen credit card information on a massive scale.  The U.S. Secret Service obtained a copy of the back-end server hosting Card Planet and determined that over 150,000 stolen credit card numbers were offered for sale on the site.  The numbers appear to have been issued by over 1300 banks.  Burkov was arrested while vacationing in Israel in 2015 and extradited to the United States in 2019.  The USSS was not able to seize any assets from Burkov and he is likely to be deported to Russia upon serving his sentence.

Defendants were charged with acting as agents of the Saudi government without notice to the Attorney General for their roles in the unauthorized access of Twitter accounts of users who had publicly renounced the Saudi government.  Defendants Abouammo and Alzabarah were employees of Twitter and were provided user names that were of interest to the Saudi government by a foreign official/representative of the Saudi Royal Family.

Defendants Goettsche, Balaci, and Weeks have been charged with conspiracy to engage in wire fraud in connection with their roles in BitClub Network.  From April 2014 through December 2019, BitClub Network was a fraudulent scheme that solicited money from investors in exchange for shares of purported cryptocurrency mining pools and rewarded investors for recruiting new investors into the scheme.  Goettsche, Balaci, Weeks, and others conspired together to solicit investment in BitClub Network through fraudulent means, including by providing false and misleading figures that BitClub investors were told were “bitcoin mining earnings” purportedly generated by BitClub Network’s bitcoin mining pool.  Goettsche, Balaci, Weeks, and others obtained the equivalent of at least $722 million from BitClub Network investors.  

Defendants Goettsche, Balaci, Weeks, and Abel also conspired to sell BitClub Network shares—which were securities—notwithstanding that BitClub Network did not register the shares with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  Weeks and Abel created videos and traveled around the United States and the world to promote BitClub Network and recruit others to invest.